With Passion and Precision

Scritto da Atrium Magazin für Wohnkultur, Design und Architektur
Schlieren, Svizzera
01.08.14

Please touch! PERFORMA designs furniture with wonderfully soft, colourful surfaces made of natural rubber and linoleum.

Flexible: the height of the hooks on the coat rack can be varied as required. "hock!" can be used as a seat, sculpture or table.

The slogan "With passion and precision" describes the profile of the Heilbronn-based company to a T. The products in the Performa furniture collection are captivatingly simple, of striking clarity, equipped with ingenious details and produced to the highest technical standards. The small Swabian firm and its team of ten specialises in perfectly designed surfaces made of linoleum or natural rubber. It is the pleasantly warm, flexible touch and feel of these materials that give the furniture its special character. Even though they are far from easy to work with – the finish is after all part of the process right from the start – these materials exemplify the meticulous care the company brings to its work. Every single product is made on site in the firm's own workshops, where a CNC milling machine plays the lead role in the production process.

Visionary and practical: precision down to the last detail is the compelling strength of Matthias Eckert (left) and Martin Ric.

"Even so, despite all this technical sophistication, we don't sell a single piece of furniture that hasn't had its edges finished by hand," says Managing Director Martin Ric, emphasising the importance of the human factor. Together with his partner and production manager Matthias Eckert, who he met when the two of them were fellow students in a master class, he founded Performa in the late 1990s. Being located in Heilbronn is definitely an advantage: the area is home to a great many automotive suppliers, enabling the company to source all the metal parts it needs within a 20 kilometre radius.

Customisable: all Performa's furniture is available with natural rubber, linoleum or wooden surfaces.

Clear-cut design: the castor-mounted bed combines serenity with mobility.

The two dynamic managers call themselves designing manufacturers – a description that illustrates just how much importance they attach to the implementation of a design idea. "First and foremost, the design is a product of the struggle for feasibility," explains Ric. In the case of the "performanuf" slideboard, for instance, he kept searching for a neat solution for the fold-down doors until he found what he was looking for in the automotive supplier industry: thanks to a high-tech foil normally used for accelerator pedals, it was possible to design a foil hinge that doesn't require any fittings at all and thus impressively reinforces the clarity of the overall design.

Off the peg: the "swing" storage modules are braced between the floor and ceiling and can adapt to any room height.

The Performa team's answer to the request for a children's coat rack was no less stylish: the hooks can be adapted as required by inserting them into slits at different heights. A convincing technical detail: an adjustment screw on the back to compensate for humidity-related changes. Performa's expertise has long since established the company's reputation amongst experts: renowned architects like Jürgen Mayer H., Graft or Patricia Urquiola commission Performa to produce entire interiors, whilst bigger manufacturers such as Wilkhahn or Team by Wellis entrust the Heilbronn company with the production of individual pieces for their collections. Performa has set itself a goal for the future, too: it aims to shine a spotlight on its own, exquisite collection and make it accessible to lovers of special furniture everywhere.

A mere hint of a shelving unit: made of frosted acrylic glass, "screen" partitions the space whilst permitting maximum transparency.